people, was killed in the early morning as he tried to rob a boda-boda passenger.
Kasubi View, where I was told I had lived, would at some time have given a view of the 1884 tomb of Mutesa I, hill looking to hill across the city. The city was too built up now to give this view. I don’t think I had seen it even in 1966. Busy with my book, following the local situation with only half a mind, thinking that I had all the time in the world for local events and local sightseeing, never imagining that in pacific Kampala there would be army trucks on the streets, I had put Kasubi off until it was too late. I had been given a letter of introduction to the Kabaka, Sir Frederick Mutesa, otherwise Mutesa II. But I had not sent it till March. I got a civil reply—amazing in the circumstances—but then it was too late.
Obote, the prime minister, had sent in the army (under Amin) against the almost defenceless palace of the Kabaka. Most people thought that something so sacrilegious—the offering of violence to a man who was more than an African king, was an embodiment of the soul of his people—would never have happened. Somehow the Kabaka had managed to get away. He found a terrible kind of pauper’s sanctuary in England, painful for a kabaka, and died there three years later in 1969 at the age of forty-five. His tragedy and especially his early death is still mourned by some people in Uganda. (Though Sunna died at forty, and Mutesa I at forty-eight.)
Near the end of my time in East Africa in 1966 I went to see the Kasubi tombs, where (at that time) two kabakas were buried. I have no memory of going to look at the Kabaka’s palace; I suppose it was still out of bounds. And I have only a vague memory of the tombs. I suppose there was still a discouraging army presence. I stayed only a short time, and (I imagine) was not allowed to see inside. But what I saw in those hurried moments stayed with me, becoming more and more magical over the years: a round grass structure, beautifully proportioned, with a high conical roof taller than anything I had seen in grass, the grass very fine, the eaves beautifully trimmed: an African fairyland.
Now at last I was given the chance to see more.
Kasubi had become a UNESCO heritage site. There was a little office outside the sacred area. We picked up a guide there, or perhaps we were picked up by him. Immediately within the site itself there was a grass gatehouse. It was dark, with wooden pillars in two rows supporting the roof. The pillars were a surprise; I didn’t know that pillars below the grass dome were a feature of this architecture. Beyond the gatehouse, and to the left, was the drum hut. It was full of drums. Drums were sacred; each had its own sound and different drums were used for different occasions. But our guide didn’t show us the drums, and though he said he came from the drum-beating clan that served the Kabaka, he didn’t offer to give us a demonstration. He added that the Kabaka’s drum-beaters had to be castrated, since they were always about the Kabaka and were likely to gaze on the Kabaka’s women. This was said more to thrill us than anything else. He himself was not castrated.
From the gatehouse a paved path as straight as a Buganda road led through the brightness of bare ground to the main building and the darkness of the entrance there below the eaves that came down almost to the ground. All about the edge of this bare area were little huts, some rectangular, some round. These huts were for attendants who looked after the place and especially looked after the fire in the open yard which symbolised the Kabaka’s life. Why was the ground so bare here? Wouldn’t grass have been more welcoming? It was suggested that snakes were easier to see on bare ground.
Inside the tomb itself, on the left of the entrance, in the abrupt gloom, and not immediately noticeable, was an old woman sitting on a purple-striped raffia mat, one of many raffia mats just beyond the entrance, these raffia mats providing the only colour in this part of the tomb. The old woman was bundled up in a long blue-patterned dress of cotton, a little restless in limb,